Celebrating Catholic Family and Faith with crafts, Catechesis and traditions!
I have often approached Holy Week as the big last chance, the final countdown, the last surge to try and reflect better, pray better, enter into the Passion more perfectly.
But this Lent, I feel like the Lord has been calling me to dig deeper and more honestly.
Holy Week is here and instead of trying to squeeze in elaborate crafts or activities for each day of Holy Week, I’m looking at something SIMPLER, but perhaps more meaningful.
By drawing connections between the events of each day of Holy Week with the challenges of motherhood and family life, I think I can better focus my reflection and hopefully deepen my prayer!
With Advent just around the corner, we know that things are going to ramp up with Christmas shopping, Christmas parties, Christmas music in every store and Christmas decor all around.
There will be Christmas concerts and wishlists…and it’s hard not to get caught up in the rush of it all.
After quite the busy year with two daughters getting married, I have found myself in a new season of life: together with my Dad and brother and my husband, I am caring for my beloved Mom, as she nears the end of her life in palliative care.
Holy Week is almost here and instead of trying to squeeze in elaborate crafts or activities for each day of Holy Week, I’m looking at something SIMPLER, but perhaps more meaningful.
By drawing connections between the events of each day of Holy Week with the challenges of motherhood and family life, I think I can better focus my reflection and hopefully deepen my prayer!
Something that has become more and more apparent as my kids one-by-one enter adulthood, is that while my vocation as Mom never ends, it does change! I remember those days of mothering with littles running around the house. They needed me for the physical things; food, drink, shelter, safety, comfort, and clothing, and they were learning so much in terms of basic skills and interests, subjects at school, and picking up prayers, Bible stories and beliefs of our Catholic Faith.
My eldest daughter Emily just got married a few days ago! My next daughter Kelly gets married next summer! My eldest son, Joseph is a brand-new engineering grad, my youngest daughter Bridget has just started University and the youngest of my five kids, Adam, just started high school!
With their increasing independence, my role as hero-support is changing too. Sometimes it’s a little bit of tug-a-war. They’re grasping for more independence, but sometimes still huddling close for the comfort of reassurance or a helping hand.
For the most part, I’m excited to help them! I particularly enjoy contributing where my gifts coincide. Throughout the prep time for this last wedding, I was confident in my ability to tackle creative projects, coordinating Kelly’s artwork with Emily’s passion for the wedding theme and the ensuing complexity.
My heart feels different some days. I love it when they come to me for my perspective, but sometimes it stings when they reject it, but still rely on me to make their way work.
Sometimes I’m torn, trying to meet the needs of one of my adult kids, while called and stretched to meet the needs of another.
I can get preoccupied trying to over-plan, anticipate glitches, and take precautions to help things go smoothly for multiple grown-up kids at a time. Their needs and their plans are adult ones and the urgency of their needs often takes priority over my own.
And getting to know them as they mature in their beliefs and hopes and Faith is an honor! We’re still learning from each other, all of us so heavily influenced by our personal experiences.
My husband and I are called upon, often in very different situations for the unique perspective and support we can each give them. When we reflect and talk things through together, my husband and I can form an even clearer picture of the amazing and fascinating young adults our children have become!
While we don’t always have the answers to give them in the moment, and our responses are often strikingly more articulate hours or days after difficult conversations, we strive to streamline our response: to pray. We pray together with them and with each other and our most important advice to them should always be to reach out in prayer directly to Jesus.
Our circumstances, relationships, interaction and peace of mind can be ever-changing, but Jesus remains constant.
We are once again reminded that Jesus loves them even more than we parents do. He knows the intricacies and implications way beyond what we know. He knows exactly what is to come and how it will impact their souls.
He wants the best thing for each one of us.
It’s yet another new season of motherhood for me, and incidentally yet another opportunity for a new prompt to pray!
Every time I begin getting overwhelmed, tempted to worry, and tugged into the familiar habit of over-planning, anticipating what could possibly go wrong, and pre-emptive troubleshooting, I am prompted to pray:
Please soften my heart and all of our hearts to pursue Your Blessed Will.
First and foremost, we can always ask Jesus and our Blessed Mother to prompt us to pray! Our Lady wants nothing more than to draw us closer to Her Son. She magnifies the Lord. She mentors us in humility and shows us firsthand how to love and serve God and surrender to His Holy Will.
We can pray for Our Lady’s help to love and serve her Son and draw closer to Jesus through her Immaculate Heart.
We are prompted to pray for St. Anthony’s help when something is lost and must be found. We can also pray, asking for St. Anthony to find a solution for us in our struggles, God’s Plan as we face decisions, healing for our pain or illness, peace when we are anxious, and an indication of where we are to go, when we are lost.
We pray for St. Michael’s intercession when we face temptation or aggression, blatant evil or spiritual attacks. We can renounce lies and negative thoughts that lead us astray or steal our peace.
St. Joseph kept his family safe by listening to the messages he received, following God’s Will and trusting in Him. We ask St. Joseph to make us humble and obedient and to help us to recognize and trust in God’s Plan.
When we are concerned for our marriage or family or specific loved ones, we can pray for St. Joseph’s help or St. Monica’s intercession.
We pray for St. Therese’s help when we’re frustrated by our littleness and sin.
St. Therese would remind us that our littleness endears us to God! We can run to Jesus like a little child and let St. Therese show us the way!
We pray with St. Gertrude throughout the month of November (and all year long!) for the Holy Souls in purgatory and for sinners:
Eternal Father, I offer Thee the Most Precious Blood of Thy Divine Son, Jesus, in union with the masses said throughout the world today, for all the holy souls in purgatory, for sinners everywhere, for sinners in the universal church, those in my own home and within my family. Amen. Pray With Us!
We pray for St. Jude’s or St. Rita’s intercession when we face a desperate or hopeless situation.
When we pray the Divine Mercy Chaplet, we pray for the assurance of God’s Mercy. We imagine Jesus giving us the words, as He gave them to St. Faustina.
We can ask Brother Lawrence and St. Benedict to remind us to pray as we work and throughout all of our daily tasks. We can ask them to prompt us to remain mindful of God’s Presence.
We can ask for the intercession of St. Raphael, St. Andre, or St. Peregrine (or any of our other favorite patron saints or Blesseds) when we need healing.
When we need courage, we can ask for help from St. Michael, St. Joan of Arc,
St. Lawrence, St. Lucy or any of the Saints and Martyrs.
We can ask St. Teresa of Calcutta to help us to serve others and to see the Face of Jesus in each person we encounter.
As we prepare for confession, we can ask for help from St. John the Baptist,
St. Ignatius or St. Padre Pio to help us examine our conscience and to reveal our sin to us.
When we need to trust in God, we can choose to repeat the words with St. Faustina and St. Kateri: Jesus, I trust in You, and consciously surrender our concerns to Him.
This article first appeared on CatholicMom.com as part of an on-going research project. See the first article here:
The Saints Were Prompted to Pray: Are you?
There are so many ways to pray! We have such a rich tradition of classic prayers and devotions, but we can also speak spontaneously to God in familial conversation. We are told by Jesus and by St. Paul to pray without ceasing and yet we are easily distracted and sometimes forget to pray.
I have become fascinated with learning what the Saints taught about Prayer!
Reading their teaching on prayer, there seems to be a consensus that we don’t need a list of rules or instructions to pray, but we need humility and perseverance. We should strive to pray from the heart with focus and intention.
And if want to try and pray without ceasing, we need to build a habit of prayer, and prompts to pray are helpful to do just that!
While I have written quite a bit about how we can be prompted to pray, I have been researching how the Saints were prompted to pray!
Perhaps what prompted these Saints to pray, can help us in our own habit-making quest to pray without ceasing!
St. Benedict was prompted to pray at specific times of day and night, but he also used visual cues as reminders to pray. He would make a point of praying every time he walked under one of the many arches at the monastery of Monte Cassino. (Giacomo Cardinal Lecaro, Methods of Mental Prayer. Westminster: Newman Press, 1957)
Is there a house or a statue or a piece of Sacred Art that you pass by every day, that can prompt YOU to pray?
St. Ignatius of Loyola was prompted to pray about specific events or actions of each day, through The Daily Examen, reflect on them and let them guide and transform him.
Are YOU prompted to pray The Daily Examen before you go to bed each night?
St. Teresa of Avila
I just curated our first-ever St. Mark’s Women’s Ministry Weekend Retreat this past weekend and it was packed with prayerfully-chosen videos of Fr. Mike Schmitz and Fr. Casey talking about why we pray and how we pray MORE.
We read out a few beautiful reflections from Jerry Windley-Daoust’s Imagine You Walked With Jesus: A Guide to Ignatian Contemplative Prayer, leading the ladies through prayer journaling with the journals we gifted them.
Read my REVIEW of this Treasure-of-a-book here: Imagine You Walked With Jesus {Book Review}
Permission by Found Together
I Can Only Imagine by Mercy Me
Amazing Grace (These Chains are Gone) Chris Tomlin
I also created the Pray More Workbook and each of the ladies received a copy, along with their new prayer journals, which they had an opportunity to embellish with prayer prompt labels from this
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